Two Hills news

Dr. Cherry Vu has joined Two Hills full time as CEO. Together as a team, Rob and Cherry are branded as Teal Unicorn. We are working in Enterprise Agile, the transformation of organisations into New Ways Of Working And Managing.

Activities

Rob is a lead author of VeriSM
Rob is certified as an instructor on DevOps Foundation, DevOps Test Engineer, and Certified Agile Service Manager, for the DevOps Institute; and as facilitator of Phoenix Project and Mars Lander simulations for GamingWorks. All are offered by ALC Training in New Zealand.
Rob and Cherry recently presented at

Recent Recognition

Books

Two Hills now has seven books published. The latest book Plus! The Standard+Case Approach is an important new idea from Two Hills - getting huge positive response.
Introduction to Real ITSM has an integrated website as does Basic Service Management.
Introduction to Real ITSM has been developed into a workshop, using humour to communicate the importance of cultural change when doing service improvement.
Plus! The Standard+Case Approach is also used as the basis for a workshop, for responders to any situation, e.g. a service desk.
Introduction to Real ITSM has been translated and published in Russian by a Moscow business partner, Cleverics. So has Owning ITIL. Now Basic Service Management is out in Spanish!
Most of the books are now available on Kindle, which is a non-trivial conversion exercise.
More books are under consideration, such as
Basic DevOps,
Basic Service Improvement (a sequel to Basic Service Management),
the OPS4LESS Almanac,
Authenticity: the 21st Century's Lost Cause,
and Real IT - another funny one.
Rob is also a Lead Author of VeriSM - A Service Management Approach for the Digital Age

How to ensure proper expenditure on ITIL projects rated Excellent:55.6%, Very Good:44.4%
and Panel Discussion (member): Anticipating the Future to Start Crucial Changes Now
Bright*Star Inaugural IT Service Management Summit
Auckland, NZ, September 2008

Conferences

Since founding Two Hills, Rob has presented at the following conferences (not including client engagements, or local chapter meetings of itSMF, ISACA, NZ Computer Society etc, or webinars, or uncounted conferences in previous roles):

Other sites

He Tangata
He Tangata is about putting people first in IT. Not technology or process. If we put people first we can achieve efficency and effectiveness. We can transform our processes and improve our technology and leverage our partners. More projects will succeed and more will stay succcessful without backsliding over time. If we put people first.

Real ITSM
In order to regulate the Real ITSM industry, and thereby protect the integrity of RITSI and public confidence in Real ITSM, RITSI issues compliance certification to users, products, and services under the FavorITSM program. Other frameworks have sadly neglected the revenue potential of such compliance certification, and have left it open to foraging commercial entities. RITSI has no intention of making the same mistake, although for a suitable consideration from an interested party we could conceivably reconsider this policy.
[Before you write to me, it's satire]

The CoPr Manifesto
Core Practice is business management information provided free, in the public domain, contributed by the community. We believe this is a revolutionary concept: Core Practice seeks to change the world.

About Core Practice
Not everyone can afford or wants best practice. We fully support best practices for those organisations that have the commitment and resources and reason to adopt best practice. For those who do not, something more pragmatic is required, which can be distilled from best practice as well as from legislative requirements and other sources. For these organisations (e.g. small businesses, start-ups, the cash-strapped) there is Core Practice. “If you do nothing else, do these things.”

We have a teapot
In the kitchen cupboard is a teapot. A nice simple white china teapot. I drive the economy by not using it.

The first principle of getting rich is to not be directly involved
There are people who get rich on their own time: lawyers and media stars spring to mind. But the first group have to be really smart, and work really hard for years; and the second group have to be born with some talent and then get really lucky or sleep with the right people. Either way it is hard to arrange, so keep your hours out of it.

ITIL’s dead elephant: CMDB can't be done
CMDB can’t be done. Not as ITIL defines it. At least not with a justifiable return on the investment of doing it - it is such an enormous undertaking that any organisation attempting it is going to burn money on an irresponsible scale. The truth about CMDB is no secret. It is a “dead elephant”: a great putrescence in the corner of the room that everyone studiously ignores, stepping around it and ignoring the stench, because life will be so much simpler if they do not acknowledge the obvious.

Debasement of concepts by IT vendors and analysts
The persistent erosion of meaning in IT terminology is a damaging practice endemic across vendors and analysts. When a concept gains some currency and everyone wants it, suddenly all the vendors have got it - often by re-labelling a feature of their existing product. And the analysts keep confusing the definition so no-one can call the vendors out for this obfuscation. I used to really struggle with this. I thought I kept getting the wrong end of the stick with new terminology, until I realised that is was other people moving the stick.

efficiency and effectiveness
Always remember that costs can be cut in two ways: by concentrating on efficiency or effectiveness. We often spend too much time on the former, and sometimes even reduce the latter.

The 7 Top Reasons Why You Can’t Quit Your Job
You are worried about not knowing what will happen to you. You can drive half-a-ton of steel at sixty miles an hour inches away from other vehicles, and trust their drivers to do the same. You can purchase and eat food that you didn’t see being cooked. You can enter a convenience store after nightfall. You regularly plug and unplug cables carrying 120 volts (or 240 volts) of lethal electricity. Heck, you pipe the stuff through a pad in your bed. But changing jobs is really dangerous.

Every good boy deserves men
Somewhere around teenage, almost all boys switch from "My Dad can beat your Dad" to "My Dad is an idiot" (that is, if their father is still around at that point). Disillusioned when they discover he is not in fact superhuman, they reject their father, and especially his advice. (Actually I know a certain eight-year-old boy who doesn't give much credence to his father's advice already).